Archive for the ‘Praise’ Category

Fine: Here’s some love for the New Jersey Devils

Posted by Justin Bourne under Praise on Feb 11, 2013

New Jersey Devils v Pittsburgh Penguins

Be honest, non-Devils fans: you’re kinda surprised by New Jersey’s success this year. Even last year, you didn’t consider them one of the better teams in the east, right? It’s not that you thought they were actually bad, it’s just that…c’mon: everyone loves on the Penguins. The Flyers seemed poised to win it all. The Rangers seemed to have all the pieces. The Bruins were just a year removed from a Cup and had barely changed. There were a ton of teams you would’ve put on a pedestal before them, but…there they were. In the Stanley Cup Final, pushing what seemed to be an unstoppable Los Angeles Kings team to Game Six. NOT GLAMOROUS ENOUGH, I thought.

Still…it did feel like they overachieved to get there. Then they lost their star player Zach Parise to unrestricted free agency in the summer, a tough go considering few people considered them an offensive juggernaut (15th in goals-per-game last year). Add to that Brodeur being another year older and yeah…I picked them to miss the playoffs this season. Read the rest of this entry »

9 Comments

In Praise of Shitty Goalies

Posted by Ellen Etchingham under Praise on Dec 05, 2012

The author, doing her part to make hockey better by playing net horribly.

The first time I ever played hockey, they put me in net.

It wasn’t ice hockey. It was inline, in tropical heat under a smoggy sky on a concrete rink by the South China Sea. They showed me a tin shed where heap of moldering equipment lay, all of it thin and shoddy, all of it various kinds of broken. There was a glove so big it slid off my fingers and a blocker that didn’t have any fingers left, a mask held together with twist ties and a chest protector with no fastenings at all save one outrageously long length of dangling elastic, which I had to wrap around my torso three times and tie to itself. As I played, it would slowly unwind around my body and pull the plates all askew, leaving scalene slices of my stomach and shoulders exposed. Even a real goalie who knew how to fit all the armor would have had trouble making this stuff function as protection, and I was not a real goalie.

Or maybe I was. If the definition of a goalie is one who stands in the net and tries to stop pucks, then I was a goalie. I was just a really, really, really, really shitty goalie. There are not enough reallys in the world to describe how shitty of a goalie I was. I hung out so far back in my net I’d look down and find I had a foot behind the goal line. I went down when skaters were barely two strides over center. Positioning? Fuck no, I was covering angles so absurd you’d need to invent a new branch of theoretical geometry to measure them. Butterfly? Only if by that you mean something that’s small, delicate, and flutters away at the first sign of danger.

Read the rest of this entry »

21 Comments

Nicklas Lidstrom is a good dude

Posted by Chris Lund under Praise on Jun 04, 2012

The above photo was posted to the Detroit Red Wings Facebook page. I may be a sap, but I love seeing gestures like this.
Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments

Matt Cooke is officially the Mario Lemieux of this generation

Posted by Chris Lund under Night in review, Praise, Score Video on Feb 18, 2012

Note there are only three people there

Matt Cooke is having a renaissance of sorts this season. His point totals are roughly the same, but you’ll note that he only has 20 penalty minutes to this point in the season. This is the same Matt Cooke who, one year ago, had been suspended for barely more games than he had actually scored in. He became the face of everything wrong with the modern game. A simple goon who added no value to his team and badly injured key players of other teams.

Fast forward one season and Cooke has been a productive two way player and kept himself out of the doghouse. Those of you who have been watching Cooke this season have been just as shocked with his turnaround as I have, I’m sure.

Today Cooke made some Penguins history as he became the first Pittsburgh player since Mario Lemieux in 1988 to score a shorthanded goal with two guys in the penalty box. It’s official folks, Matt Cooke has erased Mario Lemieux from the books as the most recent holder of a record distinction. Now is the time to head into your improvised bomb shelters.

Look at Cooke’s shorthanded, breakaway beauty. Read the rest of this entry »

2 Comments

The Anaheim Ducks are officially a top notch organization in my books

Posted by Chris Lund under Praise on Jan 05, 2012

Aleksandro Salei, son of Ruslan Salei, takes in the pregame with his dad's former team

For all that has been talked about what constitutes a proper tribute in the months following the Lokomotiv crash I’ve got to hand it to the Anaheim Ducks for absolutely leaving me frozen when I saw this picture. As you can see that is Aleksandro Salei, son of longtime Ducks defenceman Ruslan, on the ice at the Honda Centre with the Ducks for the national anthems.

I wanted to make sure that people had the opportunity to see this image as it serves as a reminder to all of us that it was more than a hockey team that was lost in that crash. It was also fathers, husbands, brothers, etc. – hockey was just the thing that bound them all together as teammates and with us, the fans.

I know I’ll be cheering for that Salei 24 jersey to make an appearance in the NHL once again in the not too distant future.

7 Comments

The Sedins Aren’t Just Good, They’re a Different Kind of Good

Posted by Justin Bourne under Analysis, Praise on Oct 13, 2011

By now you’re probably up on the fact that the Sedin brothers are good at hockey. If you’re not, well, take off the Chicago Blackhawks coloured blindfold.

The Sedins are my favourite players in the league, and I’m no Canucks fan.

They were damn close to winning back-to-back Hart Trophies. They took their team to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final last year. They’re accomplished, and we’re all well aware of that.

But what I love so much about them is that they’re doing what they’re doing entirely differently than any other superstars in the NHL, and differently than anyone I can ever remember watching play.

We tend to minimize what they do because oh, they’re those crazy-looking twins, they’re telepathic! Hahaha.

Of course, they’re not telepathic. They’re just insanely #%&!ing good and crazy smart.

Over the years, Alex Ovechkin has accomplished what he has with sheer power, pedal constantly to the floor. His fastball is better than yours, and he’s gonna bring it up and in. Skates hard, shoots hard, hits hard.

Not an uncommon picture.

Sidney Crosby does it with golden hands, great vision and dogged determination. He is, through and through, a hockey player. He’s good at everything, and great at most things.

Datsyuk is unique like them, but Zetterberg is just flat-out good at hockey.

It’s having the two of them together that’s so petrifying.

The only other possible duo I can think of that thought the game in a unique way as the Sedins do at the same time would probably be Jari Kurri and Wayne Gretzky, but the I still think these two take the ”unique” factor to the next level.

When you kill penalties, you have certain rotations set up to defend whatever formation your opponent is using. All of these defensive techniques are based on the assumption that players go to certain spots and try to set up certain looks just because that’s what they’ve always done.

It’s almost always some variation of a guy on the wall, one on the goal line and one in front, or – gasp – an umbrella. Read the rest of this entry »

36 Comments